When was Outlook ever usable? On a scale from A to F, Outlook might get a D+, it technically works, and you could in theory perform email related tasks, but, the experience is so degraded, and impassable, no one would, at least if they're a professional.

To be fair, it might, but the damage I've seen LLM's cause, including Claude, is insane. A week ago, I saw it trash an entire project due to CSS cleanups, that were total nonsense.

I just asked Claude to write a recursive function, where all the types were known, and my instructions were clear. It failed, I had to rewrite the function myself, I see the same issue with code all the time. Sometimes it gets it right, and the code is awesome, but, more often the code is sloppy, has logic errors, security issues, and needs rework by a human.

Any claim that Claude can take COBOL and turn it into anything else, without a metric crap load of human intervention, is incredibly short-sighted, and likely negotiant. I would check every single line it generates, which isn't to say it couldn't help, but it isn't trustworthy.

I read a huge number of resumes, last year I probably read over a thousand. When someone applies for a job at our company, and it's in an area I cover, I, personally, read the resume. I don't skim it, I don't use AI to read a summary, I sit down, and read it, well taking notes.

The company was hiring for two positions, a QA person, and a developer. I wrote the job posting, and both of them were clean, clear, and straightforward. Out of over a thousand applicants, eleven got a first round interview, which is a rejection rate of 98.9%, for a first round. AI isn't hurting applicants, it's make them unhirable, for multiple reasons.

The biggest single reason I failed people, lack of experience, and applying without reading the job ad. The number of Java developers who applied for a JavaScript developer position, was insane. How did anyone make that error? They're two possibilities, either, you used AI to apply, or, you're grossly unqualified.

The next serious issue, the dump mauver, where you overload your resume with numbers, acronyms, and technology stacks. A huge number of the applicants, apparently, were qualified to an expert level, in every single technology stack and technology, since 1970.

Then we have the length issue, do not send someone an eleven-page resume. It shows me you haven't bothered to read the job ad, since your resume is generic, and bloated, while disrespecting my time, and effort to read it. On that point, why are jumping jobs every nine months? If your work history looks like you're on the run, and constantly relocating, you need to settle down. I can understand one or two short-term jumps, but ten of them? Which directly leads into the puffery problem. Don't inflate what you actually did, just be honest, I can see through it instantly. If you were a manager of a large internation team, that did every possible role, all at once, while scaling company growth, you wouldn't have left after one year.

What's next? Stop putting social media and GIT repo links on your resume, unless they are spectacular, or interesting. I can see your GIT history, so I know in the last two years, you added five commits, all on forked projects, to stage your GitHub profile. If you want to add a portfolio site, or a blog site, cool, but make sure you developed it from scratch. If you link me to a GeoCities style portfolio site, what do you want me to take from that? You're a web developer who can't develop their own site, but wanted to show me that? Why?

One more annoyance, learn how to format a document, use a reasonable template, and use PDF. Your resume should be easy to read, simple, and formatted properly. The number of people who sent corrupted DOCX resumes, was shocking. In every case, I reached out and asked for a PDF version, and in some cases fixed the formatting before I read it, and didn't deduct marks.

AI has not helped hiring, it's made a terrible process even worse. Where the old system was just a full toilet, now it's overflowing, and companies are throwing in sponges to copy each other.

There are two main issues leading to the fallout:

1. Far too many entitled slow flakes across industries, complaints are considered the gold standard of accountability, and it doesn't matter whether they're baseless or not.

I've had complaints filed against me for all kind of nonsense, but a short list:

- Using medical cannabis outside the office building, to spite HR having a copy of the prescription and associated medical documents.
- Refused the request of a Muslim coworker to pray at the Mosque, during a looming, serious deadline.
- Cleaning my desk, the smell bothered someone.
- Turning the temperature down in my office, a woman got cold.
- Using the washroom off hours.
- Having privilege, yes, really, having white male privilege...
- Asking a smoker (cig), to please not sit next to me, he STANK.
- Using my own coffee mug in the office.
- Having a GIT branch called Master.
- Using the words White / Black list.
- So on....

2. The internet. Screw AI, the problem is: People don't know how to read, double check and confirm. AI might make the problem worse, but the primary issue is people are clueless idiots.

If you read Monday's privacy policy, it's absolutely insane. To summarize it: "We will track you, stalk you, and digitally molest you. If you say no, stop or try to involve law enforcement, including your privacy commissioners, we will make your life a living hell, and fight any legal intervention to the end of the earth.". It includes sections that talk about how they'll use cookies, and pixels, to track you cross domain. They will seek out any information they can on you, regardless if you provide it, and you have no ability to restrict them. If you block their tracking, they will take that as an offensive move, and can terminate your licenses, but won't delete the data. On and on it goes, it's honestly insane, it would give Epstein a hard on.

In that course, I break the policy down clause by clause, using colour codes to compare what it's saying. It includes commentary from people at Monday, which we only have because a coworker sent my critique of the policy to them. You can see the people at Monday lying, outright lying, where they'll claim a cookie or pixel can't track you, and doesn't stalk you online. At one point, someone mentions they don't have time to manually stalk you, but then also defend doing cross domain tracking using cookies and pixels.

Contrasted to that, is the Salesforce privacy policy, and you can see they are entirely different from each other. Salesforce makes it clear you should be wiping your browser frequently, using extensions to block your data, masking your IP and User Agent, and so on, it's impressive.

When you read those and contrast them, that should be light a fire. That's why I love the camera in the bedroom example, you see that kind of analog in many privacy policies.

Lawyers will say they can't legally abuse you online, but, where are the federal, and provincial or state active protections? If I email our Privacy Commissioner both Federally and Provincially, they will tell me there is nothing wrong with any of the software used in schools, even if you present them with the policies broken down.

Today, a JR Dev completely broke a page of our platform by using AI. The class was called: "doubleSpan", and the AI decided the right setting for the "grid-row" was "span 1". Five line above that, the "grid-row" is set to "span 1", for the default of a single span. The AI honest didn't figure out that a class called "doubleSpan" should span twice area.

If AI can't figure out something simple like that, where the class name explains what to do, how does anyone think in 18 months, all white-collar work will be done with AI? AI is useless if the person driving it, isn't aware, and so all that will happen is the slop effect will get worse.

Guess I have to add something above to exceed some character per line threshold, not sure why, but I'll over some of the stuff I'd cover in each section.

1. What is encryption? How to protect yourself using it.
- Drive encryption, that's not by passable (easily) - LUKS, Vera Crypt, etc
- How to use tools like Vera Crypt to protect sensitive files.
- Understanding why removable drives, such as USB, should be encrypted.
- Understanding why encrypted communication is important.
- Understanding you need to hold the keys.
etc...

2. How to verify identity online, using technology such as PGP.
- Why email is basically a flaming dumpster fire of security problems.
- Why PGP + email can create a reasonable approachable "secure" email.
- Understanding that you should never trust baseless identity claims.
- How to check a person's identity using real Zero Trust.
- Difference between PGP, X.508 and other technologies.
- Why open standards matter.

3. How to read and understand software licensing and privacy policies.
- How to not allow Microsoft or Monday to digitally molest you?
- If you can't understand how invasive, and violating most policies are, why did you click Okay?
- This is basic reading comprehension.
- Don't just skip reading these, take time to do a complete read through, and if you're not clear, seek out help.
- Understand you can say "no", you don't have to a violation first platform.

4. How to understand unsafe data handling practices.
- You need to understand policies and licenses to get into this.
- Why "Cookies" are a dangerous technology.
- Why tracking is bad.
- Why Pixels are bad (Facebook).
etc...

5. Why open standards matter. For instance, why you should use ODF instead of DOCX.
- ODF is the Open Document Format, it's not locked or controlled by any one company.
- Platforms that lock you in, are dangerous.
- No tool should have a locked format.
- Being able to move between tools and platforms independently is important.
- Having control over your data is important.
- Being able to read and access your data is important.
- Formats like DOCX are designed to platform lock you, into buying expensive low-quality software.
- Proprietary formats are another form of a violation.

6. How to pick privacy and digital liberty protecting software.
- Why you should pick LibreOffice instead of Microsoft Office.
- Why you should pick Linux or FreeBSD instead of Windows.
- Why you need to think about how software handles your data.
- Examine how companies want to abuse, use, and violate your data.
- Examine how schools, and workplaces, commit acts of data abuse and violation.
- Compare companies like Microsoft and Facebook to Epstein, which on a digital front is fair.

7. The dangers of subscription first licensing.
- The dangers of paying to use a product, that you don't have guaranteed access to.
- What happens when the license terms changes.
- What happens if the company closes down.
- Why maintaining platform and tool independence is critical.
- Preventing lock in.
- Look at how dishonest and abusive Microsoft Office 365 is as an example, vs LibreOffice.

8. Backups, why, how, and why they're actually important.

- I don't need to add to this

9. Domain separation, how to separate Work, Personal, Temp and other activities.
- Go into things like VM's, Containers.
- Talk about isolation based operating systems, like Qubes OS.
- Contrast Windows with Qubes.
- Contrast Containers vs VMS, and show practical application.

10. OS selection. Yes, I really want kids to know you have to consider the OS you run.
- Why you need to consider your OS.
- Linux vs Windows vs Unix.
- Why Linux and Unix (high level).
- Why open is better.
- How companies like Microsoft give the OS away, in exchange for violating and abusing you digitally.
- Why open is not a silver bullet.
- Things to consider about your OS.
- Locking things down tighter then a nuns nasty.

11. Safe browsing, which goes into all user agent masking, IP masking, profiles, containers and all that lovely stuff.
- What is a user agent, and why it matters.
- What a VPN is actually for.
- Why giving out our IP is dangerous.
- What a profile / container is in the browser, and why they're important. Bring in the domain stuff from above.
- Why you should block cookies.
- Why you should carefully review your browsers settings.

12. The importance of system cleanup, why you need to clear browsers every day, run tools like BleachBit, etc...
BleachBit is a tool that destroys numerous temp files and does a system cleanup (https://www.bleachbit.org/)
- Why you don't need your history.
- How junk gets you in trouble.
- Why logs tend to hurt you, rather than help you.
- Consider the police, or your partner, looking through your computer, out of context, bring back tools Vera Crypt
- Compare browser history and caches to a dumpster, and explain why dumpsters should be emptied regularly.
- So on.

Fair, but it's true, and kids should still understand how violating those policies can be that you just click through.

Yep, good points to cover.

I really don't think my list is advanced, we teach at that level in other areas. Why can English, Math, History, or SexEd get that treatment, but when it comes to your digital liberty and safety, it's okay to blame the computer and be ignorant?

Cutting down on the liberal studies is a good idea, we don't have enough technical courses available at the secondary level, that help supplement an education for a person who doesn't need to read Shakespeare, or learn about WW2 / WW1 in detail. What good does forcing someone to read "The Great Gatsby", accomplish, when they can't send a secure email? What is the point on taking a Native American History class, when you don't understand the privacy policy that's used by the software which delivers the course?

Every single year, from Grade K to Grade 8, my daughter's teachers would send a classwide email to all guardians and parents. In every single instance, the email was sent incorrectly, listing out all the emails for all the parents and guardians in the class. Every single year I had to complain to the school, board and ministry. When you can't send an email correctly, why the hell is my daughter learning about Residencial schools?

I write a lot of IT courses, and when I have to cover licensing and privacy policy, I paint pictures.

If you read that, and still find privacy policy boring, you're not paying attention. The amount of kick back I get to that kind of explanation is actually ridiculous, being in that course, I break down the Monday.com privacy policy, and show how it's so invasive, and violating that Epstein would get a hard on.

On the Monday.com privacy policy, they outright state they'll digitally stock you using third-party cookies, pixels, and any other means they can find to harvest your data. When I pointed that out to the company owner, he sent it to Monday who came back saying it was "impossible, and we don't have time to stalk you.", really? That's what cookies are for, that's what tracking pixels do, that's why you use them. Hence, the camera in the bedroom example, they want a camera in your bedroom, and what do you get from it? A very low-quality software? A terrible task management system? A useless project management platform?

Not hearing about something doesn't mean it's not basic. If I asked the average homeowner to get me a #2 Robertson screwdriver, could they? Would they know there are different indexed sizes? Would they know what a Robertson even looks like? How often do you hear Phillips called the Star, even though there is an actual Star that is not Phillips. That's a great example of something basic, that many people don't know, I bet 99% of homeowners don't know the correct driver to use for the lug connectors on the outlet, and it's not Robertson, Phillips or Slot.

What's the chances this new "computer literacy proficiency" won't actually cover useful proficiency? Some very basic aspect I would expect a student to know:

1. What is encryption? How to protect yourself using it.
2. How to verify identity online, using technology such as PGP.
3. How to read and understand software licensing and privacy policies.
4. How to understand unsafe data handling practices.
5. Why open standards matter. For instance, why you should use ODF instead of DOCX.
6. How to pick privacy and digital liberty protecting software.
7. The dangers of subscription first licensing.
8. Backups, why, how, and why they're actually important.
9. Domain separation, how to separate Work, Personal, Temp and other activities.
10. OS selection. Yes, I really want kids to know you have to consider the OS you run.
11. Safe browsing, which goes into all user agent masking, IP masking, profiles, containers and all that lovely stuff.
12. The importance of system cleanup, why you need to clear browsers every day, run tools like BleachBit, etc...

So on, these are basic topics a "computer literacy proficiency" program would have to cover, among others.

Sorry, I should be more clear, when I said it was black and white, I still mean that. With something like secure boot, email, communication, it's black and white. You can't have someone else control it for you, and think it's safe.